Army Considers Slashing Brigades, Boosting Robots

With the post-9/11 financial spigots drying up, and sequestration at least partially taking a bite, the U.S. military has been put in the rather unfamiliar position of searching for cost savings over the past few years. In a speech last week at the Army Aviation Symposium in Arlington, VA, General Robert Cone, the Army’s head of Training and Doctrine and Command, indicated that they may begin looking to borrow a technique from the private sector in responding to the need for cost controls: automation.

He specifically said that the Army is considering slashing brigade combat team sizes by a quarter, from 4,000 to 3,000 troops, and making up the difference with military-grade unmanned platforms, or robots. “I’ve got clear guidance to think about what if you could robotically perform some of the tasks in terms of maneuverability, in terms of the future of the force,” he said, as well as rethinking the size of the nine-man infantry squad. As reported in Defense News, ‘Over the past 12 years of war, “in favor of force protection we’ve sacrificed a lot of things,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve also lost a lot in lethality.’ And the Army wants that maneuverability, deployability and firepower back.” As Paul McLeary of Defense News pointed out, “It’s hard to see such a radical change to the makeup of the brigade combat team as anything else than a budget move, borne out of the necessity of cutting the personnel costs that eat up almost half of the service’s total budget.” The Army is already reportedly set to slash its forces by 120,000 by 2019 to 420,000 from 540,000.

With Google buying military robot manufacturer Boston Dynamics, autonomous war machines have bubbled back into public consciousness, just in time for the new RoboCop reboot. Military robots are often the stuff of technological dystopias, when the machines rise with uber-rationalistic calculuses that invariably decide that human beings are alternately too inconstant, cruel, self-destructive, or wasteful to continue existing as a species. These machines are often told as a fable of man’s overreach, a Frankenstein for the computer age offered as a cautionary hedge against flying too close to the sun.

Cone’s speech offers a valuable counter-narrative of the robotic rise, one likely closer to the path the near future will follow. In this narrative, machines are not the manifestation of man’s ambition, but his parsimony. Technology is not the path to imitating God, but rather coping with the very limits by which our mortal finitude constrains us. And robots may enter the field of battle not by letting slip the hydraulic dogs of war, but rather ladening down the gyroscopically-guided pack mules. Especially as our human soldiers have become ever more precious commodities, we invest tremendous amounts of money to keep them safe, making manned missions ever less economical. In this telling, ever more mechanized warfare is not nightmarish, but positively mundane.

That said, I’m sure the boys at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DOD’s personal sandbox of futurism, are hard at work on projects of sufficient dystopian potential to keep all of us up at night. And Google’s merchants of war in Boston are already halfway there.

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11 Responses to Army Considers Slashing Brigades, Boosting Robots

1.) Can a robot commit, or have a war crime committed, against it? We don’t (well, of course, the USA routinely does) employ WMD’s against civilians. But similar attacks against machines would be a lot more likely.

2.) When, not if, these machines malfunction is spectacular ways, do we try their programmers?

3.) Can you teach a robot to rape somebody? Because until then, are they really replacing the soldier on the ground?

Hold onto your wallet. Do a search on the Army’s “Future Combat System” AND “boondoggle” Links to the usual DoD high tech overreach stories will surface by the dozens. Billions of dollars flushed down the toilet and the program canceled.

To think the Army could do autonomous robots without taking the taxpayers to the cleaners is a stretch.

Funny how the people who wouldn’t spend a dime to fix Detroit are happy to shovel gobs of money down the Pentagon’s black hole time and again. (With the unformed leadership getting fat and happy retiring to DoD contractor jobs regardless of their roles in acquisition screw-ups.)

As reported in Defense News, ‘Over the past 12 years of war, “in favor of force protection we’ve sacrificed a lot of things,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve also lost a lot in lethality.’ And the Army wants that maneuverability, deployability and firepower back.”

So really, it’s not about cost savings at all. The US military simply wants to be able to kill more people at a faster rate, with less chance of being observed in the process by actual human beings who might have qualms about it. Robots don’t become whistle-blowers, or commit suicide over what they’ve been part of.

“The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.”

There is no such thing as a truly autonomous robot. You always need some gateway to the system so that you can send new orders, or so that you can turn the robot off when the situation changes. Any gateway that is open to us is open to the other side as well. With live solders, this gateway is their ears and with very careful training we insure our soldiers cannot be “hacked” by the other side. With robots, we have no such assurance. It is fair to say that in robot war the “winner” will be the side that learns how to hack the other side’s robots and turn them on their masters. If you keep humans in the loop, as we do with drones today, the “winner” will be the side that learns to jam the other side’s robots. In a war against a sophisticated enemy, the US drones will be only as good as the US retains the ability to fend off jamming. When it gets ugly, EMP, all circuits fry, and then we call a do over with something else. Robots offer a different future, not a better one.

We are light years away from the instincts required o operate on a battlefield. Regardless of our fancies with movies such as Her, the series a computer does have the ability to think, and project realities in view of self and other, that will seriously curtail a robot only force.

Nothing created by man has surpassed or will surpass the endless abilities of the human mind.

What is really being advanced here will require pilots in a cockpit on station or off.

Robots may very well make the concept of war crime obsolete. With anonymous operators never leaving their home country, and thus inaccessible and unidentifiable, their commanders protected by sheer brute force that makes them inaccessible, the notion of war crime will become as obsolete as tossing a coin to see which side will fire first.

and think that the poor honest Joe can’t even sign up to be cannon fodder anymore to make an honest living. It’s hyperbole for sure, but there’s a grain of truth to that. Of course, having these robots replacing 1,000 boots on the ground will require how many more civies and non-combat personnel in the baggage train? Probably there’s more jobs there I guess, or rather hope, because the robots seem to be on track to take over all the other jobs.

Of course, the ultimate expression of a robot based war machine is found in Supreme Commander, but we’re a long ways off from that technological possibility right now. Some of the pieces are coming together but we’re nowhere close yet.